An interesting study in the March Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, ”
Electronic records of undesirable driving events,” by Oren Musicant, Hillel Bar-Geraa, and Edna Schechtman, used real-time driving event recorders to study 117,195 trips made by 109 drivers. One curious finding was a sort of ‘edge effect’ — there were more aggressive events recorded at the beginnings and ends of journeys.

We observed meaningful differences between trip edges and middle trip events frequencies. This unexpected phenomenon was found to be repeated for trips with different characteristics of duration, time of day, day of the week and for males and females. One possible explanation can be related to non-defensive driving in familiar places (Rosenbloom, Perlman, & Shahar, 2007) “near home,” which probably affects EF (event frequency) and real safety in a similar manner. Another possible explanation is that the first and last couple of driving minutes are more likely to be in urban areas, therefore having more potential for executing undesired driving events as sharp turning and braking (traffic signals). The correlation between EF and safety (accidents) may be different in urban and non-urban environments.

I’d speculate some combination thereof — and this doesn’t bode well for the idea that people would drive more carefully in their own neighborhoods.

New Jersey has one of the highest rates of pedestrian fatalities in the country, with 27 percent of auto fatalities in 2008 involving pedestrians, almost twice the national rate, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Must be all those jaywalking pedestrians, no? Not quite. Rather drivers, and this will surprise no readers of this blog, seemed to show a shocking disregard — or complete lack of knowledge — of the actual law.

Last year, Cherry Hill police set up crosswalk stings, in which officers, in some cases pushing baby strollers, would step out into a crosswalk as cars approached. Over six days, officers handed out 249 tickets and arrested one man who became irate when cited by police, Rann said.

“People would just drive right around the carriage,” he said. “It’s a matter of handing out more tickets. It gets the word out, and people start to comply.”

Another dispatch notes:

A potentially controversial part of the law says that if a driver hits a pedestrian in a crosswalk, the presumption of fault lies with the driver for not taking “due care” for the safety of the pedestrian.

What’s controversial to my mind in this case is presuming fault on anyone but the driver.

In a footnote to Traffic, MIT’s Moshe Ben-Akiva discusses the varying strategies of dynamic tolling:

“You may want to charge people for time they actually save. That will mean if congestion builds up on the tolled road you reduce the price. On the other hand, you want to maintain a certain level of speed on the toll-road. If congestion builds up you want to increase the toll so as to not have stop-and-go traffic on the tolled road. There is some confusion going on right now as to what strategy is best.”

Traffic engineers assumed high tolls would deter drivers from using express lanes. Wrong.

Many drivers, like Perkovich, assume high tolls mean the toll-free lanes are clogged. Could be true, but the tolls rise mainly due to the number of drivers willing to pay a toll.

Perhaps it’s not easy to make these decisions at high speed in a split second. Perhaps there’s some weird signaling effect going on in which higher prices lead to higher demand (for reasons of perceived quality or some other factor). Maybe the tolls aren’t high enough to deter drivers. Maybe the problem would vanish if drivers were given a more precise sense of time savings (as far as I know they are not). But South Florida drivers are not the first to be undeterred by higher tolls.

Before HOT lanes were launched on an I-10 commuter highway serving the Houston area, the Texas Transportation Institute based at Texas A & M University made an extensive study of driver attitudes and beliefs.

As many as 20 percent of the participants in several focus groups incorrectly interpreted the HOT lane toll as an index of traffic congestion in the free lanes, said Susan Chrysler, an institute research psychologist.

“Even after I showed them a video that explained it, they still misunderstood it,” Chrysler said. In Florida, DOT has responded with a crash public information campaign. A prominent message on the Express Lane website, 95express.com, clearly explains the system. And SunPass holders recently received a special mailing with the same message: higher tolls may mean a slower ride.

The market is still working, though perhaps not as rationally as might be hoped.

Despite the misunderstanding, the Express Lanes are easing traffic. Santana says the toll lanes are maintaining a comfortable 16 mile-an-hour speed advantage over the free lanes. A typical $2.50 to $3.00 rush hour toll usually buys a 45-mph drive between South Broward and downtown Miami, according to DOT data.

The north-south imbalance is just one of any number of ways we rearrange objective time and space in our heads. There are the famous examples of geographical distortion, for example, in which people routinely assume that Rome is farther south than Philadelphia or that San Diego is west of Reno (when in both cases the opposite is true). Or take a simple trip into town: Studies have found that people tend to find the inbound trip to be shorter than the outbound trip, while a journey down a street with more intersections will seem to be longer than one with fewer (and not simply because of traffic lights).

Our state of mind on any trip can influence not just our perceptions of time but of geography itself. As Dennis Proffit, et al., write in the wonderfully titled study “Seeing Mountains in Mole Hills,” in Psychological Science, “hills appear steeper when we are fatigued, encumbered by a heavy backpack, out of shape, old and in declining health”—and this is not some vague feeling, but an actual shift in our estimates of degrees of inclination. Transit planners have a rule of thumb that waiting for transit seems to take three times as long as travel itself. And then, looming over everything, is Vierordt’s Law, which, applied to commuting, roughly states: People will mentally lengthen short commutes and shorten long commutes.

The always essential In Our Time is particularly good this week: A two-parter about cities. I particularly enjoyed historian Julia Merritt talking about the historical emergence of the sedan chair and how it served to isolate its riders from the public sphere, a foreshadowing of automobility and its civic discontents.

One of the challenges in rationally implementing higher parking fees for periods of higher occupancy is the instinctive feeling, typically by merchants, that this will hurt their business. I’m all for the plight of the small merchant but, as per John Van Horn’s usual line of thinking (e.g., this post), there’s usually a problem with this: 1.) Charging more for places where parking is dear helps create more parking, and more customers; and 2.) Those same small merchants are often the ones occupying the parking that scarce parking. This latter observation is drawn from many sources, including what’s right in front of me: The white Lexus that the guys at the pork store across the street tend to park there for hours on end (they drive in from one of the islands, Staten or Long).

This usual dynamic was on display in an article about (no) Park Slope’s recent “Smart Parking” demonstration program, as reported by my local rag:

Schaller had come to the meeting seeking feedback on the Park Smart program, which hiked parking fees last April as part of an effort to reduce traffic and create turnover at parking spots on Fifth Avenue between Sackett and Third streets, and on Seventh Avenue from Lincoln Place to Sixth Street.

But the feedback from the roughly 25 people in attendance was near-unanimous: “Don’t raise the fee!”

“Merchants are suffering,” said Irene Lo Re, the director of the Fifth Avenue Business Improvement District. “I’ve never seen a year as bad as 2009. People change their behavior over a couple of dollars — are you going to completely push us out of business?”

Couple of problems here. Merchants are suffering, indeed, but so is everyone else: There’s a recession on. Second is that given that driving in New York City is a decidedly luxury endeavor (I’ll send you my insurance bill), people driving cars shouldn’t be worrying about spending an extra 50 cents to park at peak hours — and if they are, they need to examine their finances a bit more carefully. Lastly, another way to look at this is that many people, myself included, go out of their way to avoid Park Slope for any kind of consuming activity, precisely because there is never anywhere to park.

Given all the opposition (or at least the 25 people), the program must have failed, no?

Still, Lo Re had to admit that the numbers did show that Park Smart had improved available parking in the neighborhood, thereby opening spaces for more potential customers.

A study by the city compared parking behavior before the program was implemented and November — and found that people parked for five minutes less on Fifth Avenue and nine minutes less on Seventh Avenue.

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.